As a child you constantly hear adults complaining about teenagers. How they are antisocial, grumpy and impossible to get along with. I always thought to myself, “I’ll never be like that, why would I be?” For it seemed to me that teenagers (teenage girls to be precise) were this way because they cared too much about how they looked, make up and hairstyles were the second most important thing in their life, and the most important thing was boys. Now that I am a teenager, I can say that although these things are important, they are not the reason why being a teenager is so hard.

There are a lot of changes between childhood and being a teenager, and many of them are unexpected. For me, the most dramatic change has occurred recently. I have started to see the world as a new place. A place where drinking and drugs are common problems, peer pressure isn’t something you are warned about but a daily factor in many of your decisions. Friends you have known since forever begin to do things you don’t agree with, and eventually they turn into strangers. And the secret thoughts and fears told to you by your best friend are no longer about life, but about death. Suicide isn’t something you hear about on the news, it is now what keeps you up at night when your friend doesn’t reply and you don’t know why. You worry about them, about school, about what other people think of you. You put on a brave face to the world, and cry yourself to sleep in the safety of your own room.

Happy, sad, angry, confused and scared. They used to be the extent of your emotions, with a few others occasionally appearing in special circumstances. Now you don’t even know how you feel. One minute you can be happy, relaxed, calm and cool, but then one short text message can leave you angry, jealous, scared, worried, and frozen. They don’t tell you when you turn thirteen that feelings can bounce and change in seconds. I think we should be warned. Wouldn’t you like a letter in the post, telling you what will happen? That things will be scary, confusing, and different…but that you will make it through? We need something to hold on to when life is slowly slipping away, being replaced by something we cannot understand. Tell your friend today that they will make it, make them smile. Because we need our friends, and we need to keep smiling. Listen to a happy song, tell a funny joke, just hang in there and never give up.